Re: Quasado (developer of StageStack, a FreeHand replacement) considering opensource

[William F. Adams]

On Jun 7, 1:23 pm, Riccardo Mottola <riccardo.mott...@libero.it>
wrote:
> On 06/07/13 16:28, William F. Adams wrote:>   - The interface is Byzantine 
> and awful compared to FreeHand.
> >   - It's limited to what SVG allows, as opposed to empowered by having
> > Display PostScript for imaging as Altsys Virtuoso did
> >   - It's not written in Cocoa, so no Services support in Mac OS X.
> >   - lack of inspector palettes makes the interface less efficient
>
> Never tried it myself, but the screenshots look awful, almost gimp-like.
> HOwever teh drawings are good. People who know to draw, draw with
> everything...
>
>
>
> > &c. while I can muddle through using pretty much any vector tool (like
> > the guy in Japan who draws images using the drawing tools in Excel),
> > no other tools is as optimal or elegant or efficient or productive or
> > profitable as FreeHand or Altsys Virtuoso for me.
>
> Drwaing in excel? I must see that....

Here:

http://www.psfk.com/2013/05/japanese-prints-excel.html

> I Liked old versions of Freehnad, I still have the original Aldus
> floppies! I met one of the Aldus guys personally, he worked at HP back
> then. I was more interested in pageMaker actually and used FreeHand for
> drawings.
> I remember MacDraw and SuperDraw II !
>
> The last good thing was FreeHand from Macromedia, 6 or 7 I think. I used
> it on Mac 8 on 68k :)

I've always thought FreeHand v8 was the pinnacle (and I was a beta-
test for FH/MX)

> > But I've been reading through the code for xasy (Python front-end for
> > Asymptote) and have downloaded the code for METAGRAF and Cenon in the
> > past --- I made suggestions re: the Cenon interface previously, but
> > never got a dialog started.
>
> Well, I think Cenon is good, but is some sort of CAD oriented.
> On Mac I like an older version of Stone Design. I don't know how the new
> ones are, but the one that did run on PPC and 10.3 mac, is very
> open-step-ish, I love it. Not so powerful, but it replaced FreeHand for
> most DTP-like work I do, not as much as free drawing
>
> I spoke with Gregory about a port, but is unlikable.

Unfortunate.

> You could scour for older OpenStep (or even NeXT) software and try to
> get the sources, if you can. In case we then may port it. Or even old
> mac stuff, abandoned. But it must not be Carbon, but real AppKit.

It's really a shame that we can't get the source to Altsys Virtuoso
--- I tried to convince them to go back to the code for it to future-
proof FreeHand during the MX beta, but no joy.

> > I really do appreciate your work on GraphOS and am currently working
> > on a paper for TUGboat which will hopefully be of interest to you as
> > regards features and interface.
>
> Honestly, I don't think Graphos will be ever a FreeHand replacement. It
> essentially gathers the capability of our BezierPath engine (it doesn't
> use DPS for mac compatibility, but the transition lost really minimal
> functionality  that is certain fonts magic it could do).

I _really_ miss Display PostScript.

> However, i already know of several bugs (on the bug-tracker assigned to
> the only active developer, me) I want to fix and of some features I want
> to implement. The point is that up to now, Almost all features were
> there, but more or less broken, it was years of code-reorganization more
> than invention. Although some stuff had to be done ground up, likle
> circles and squars.. and object ordering, which appeared to be there,
> but was totally broken :)
>
> To make copy-paste work +really+ a lot of stuff had to be improved.
>
> Although it still looks the same.. and still has missing tools! So
> implementing those will be harder :( Especially the bezier path editor
> needs some care, I miss some functionality about handles from the times
> of Freehand or Illustrator, i don't remember.

Working on a paper which covers vector drawing features --- hopefully
that will help.

> So, don't hold your breath, but test for new releases or follow my blog
> when it announces new stuff :)

Will do.

William